Recently people have begun to declare a victor in the next-gen DVD wars. Because of the PS3, the number of BluRay players on the market are higher than the number of HD-DVD players and thus sales of BluRay discs are higher than HD-DVD players. From what I understand, the number of HD-DVD standalone players is actually higher than that of BluRay players (i.e. factor our the PS3 from the equation). Anyway, because of this I'd noticed people starting to declare BluRay the winner. But now an interesting plot twist: Paramount and Dreamworks both just declared that they will exclusively support HD-DVD. The HD-DVD camp appear to be trying to win the market based on cost. Their cheapest players are $200 cheaper than the cheapest BluRay players. Perhaps the strategy is bearing fruit. Neither format has had massive sales numbers yet and the majority of the market is holding back so far. We're still in the early adopter phase. It's still anyone's game.
For the record, I still think that downloadable content will probably be the real winner of this generation but we'll see. The video content delivery system needs to become user friendly for that to happen.
It didn't so much win them over....
ReplyDeleteThey were paid $150 million to make their titles HD DVD exclusive. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/21/technology/21disney.html
Thanks for the information. I hadn't seen that yet. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out. As I stated, most people haven't made a choice in this one yet. Their choices will, however, be influenced by whoever is seen to be winning when they go to make a choice.
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